Mohammed NaserFor Team VEXXHOST, it has been quite an eventful year with a lot of change, challenges, and growth. Here is the official VEXXHOST 2020 Recap.
The year comes to an end, and it's time for a VEXXHOST 2020 recap.
Oh, 2020. What a ride it has been!
Of course, the biggest news of the year is the pandemic. Like many other organizations worldwide, VEXXHOST was initially startled by its effect on the world but adapted and fought through it while helping the community grow. It is so great to see people come together and show support and resiliency during these testing times.
For Team VEXXHOST, it has been an eventful year with a lot of change and growth. Here are some of the important milestones for us during the year.
We welcomed the new year with an overhaul of our branding. It was a big, exciting change for us - a fresh look indeed. Our old logo and brand colors represented us well, but for the new decade, we did a look and feel which better represented our strategy toward the future.
Here's what has changed:
- A cohesive, updated look with a new font
- Change of brand colors from gray and blue to two shades of purple, representing “Day and “Night” and our uninterrupted energy in service and support.
- A revamp of the logo that still held the essence of the old branding.
The change in our branding was much appreciated and supported by our clients, the open source community, and all our well-wishers. We were proud to have all the support we received, and the same energy prompted us to move forward through the year with confidence.
As always, VEXXHOST had a range of upgrades and updates happening in our cloud offerings. Here is a look at the major ones. The Kubernetes 1.18 update was highly anticipated and featured 38 enhancements. We had it implemented around April-May, and the update made our Kubernetes offering much better in terms of user experience. We are currently working on the release of a certified version of Kubernetes 1.19 and will update you with the details really soon. So, keep an eye out for that.
The first OpenStack release of the year, “Ussuri,” came in May, and we started using the upgrade in our deployments right away. The major improvements in Ussuri were in the areas of core infrastructure layer and security and encryption. We were glad to experience these changes ourselves and provide them to our customers.
The 22nd release and currently the latest version of OpenStack, “Victoria,” released on 14th October. The main theme behind OpenStack Victoria is native integration with Kubernetes. At VEXXHOST, we were proud to implement the upgrade right away to our new private cloud deployments and continues to do so.
It is one of our great pleasures to attend the various events that happen across the world and meet up with the cloud community. Sadly, none of that happened this year, thanks to the pandemic and travel restrictions. But that doesn't mean we didn't celebrate what we needed to celebrate.
OpenStack celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, and what a journey it has been! Within a year since OpenStack was founded, VEXXHOST recognized its amazing possibilities and joined in to grow together, supporting and benefitting both ways. We congratulated the OpenStack community then and congratulate again for this amazing achievement. Together, we shall scale newer heights still!
The first-ever Virtual Open Infrastructure Summit happened from 19th to 23rd October 2020. The event was attended by IT developers, operators, and decision-makers from over 750 companies representing over 110 countries. Team VEXXHOST was proud to be a headline sponsor of the summit. The days were filled with workshops, presentations, Q&A sessions, and more.
Perhaps the most important announcement to the community during the Summit was the transition of the OpenStack Foundation into the Open Infrastructure Foundation. VEXXHOST has been a member of the OpenStack Foundation for a long time now and was proud to be a part of the evolution by becoming a Founding Silver member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation.
On Day 2 of the summit, Hind Naser, our Director of Business Development, presented a breakout session on “The Big Decision When Adopting OpenStack as a Private Cloud,” providing informative insights to the attendees on the various decisions, limitations, and pitfalls when a user is starting the private cloud journey.
Our CEO, Mohammed Naser, delivered a keynote address on the same day and made one of the biggest announcements during the presentation - a revamp of our public cloud!
The public cloud revamp is one of our biggest advancements in recent years, including a data center expansion across continents. From adding a boost to our operations for higher performance, workload acceleration, and data protection to switching to the fastest hard drive on the market without any downtime, there were many benefits to customers. The announcement was greeted with much fervor from the community. Here are some of the highlights.
For our Montreal region, we introduced new servers equipped with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors, driven by AMD Infinity Architecture. This move came as a significant boost to our operations and added value to our service for customers in terms of high-performance secure computing, contributing to better workload acceleration, infrastructure, and data protection.
Another notable change in our Montreal regions was the storage upgrade from SSD to NVMe. NVMe drives have the advantages of better speed, power-efficiency, and better scalability, against traditional SSDs. Another notable benefit available with NVMe storage is its accelerated parallel read and write capabilities. We couldn't wait to make it available to our clients and they have been reaping the many benefits of the technology since.
Furthermore, we introduced new, aggressive pricing for our public cloud. At VEXXHOST, we have always been known for our competitive prices without any compromise on the quality of service and performance. But this time around, we took it to a new level in terms of aggressive pricing while also offering the best of services to clients.
Finally, we also announced the launch of a frontline data center in Amsterdam. This addition in Europe came two years after we launched our second North American data center and further cemented VEXXHOST's global footprint.
Speaking of expansion and growth, our work is being noticed and appreciated across the cloud and open source communities.
Cloud Mercato, a research firm doing comprehensive cloud market studies and publishing them for the benefit of the community, did a benchmarkon our public cloud. We were happy to collaborate with the team and provide necessary assistance to make sure that our cloud claims are verified and substantiated.
We were also glad to be featured on Hosting Advice, a global authority on web hosting providing expert reviews, advice, guides, etc. The article details our journey so far and gives insights into our various offerings and solutions. We talked about our work as regular contributors and donors to various open source communities and our association with various open source foundations.
We thank the teams at both Cloud Mercato and Hosting Advice for supporting us. It was a pleasure working with you! We are looking forward to more such collaborations in the future.
Team VEXXHOST had an interesting and productive year filled with a lot of growth and opportunities. We hope that we get to continue our work serving our customers with the best of cloud offerings. We are also looking forward to seeing how the open source community grows, and with that, technology as a whole, for the future.
Here's to new beginnings. Happy New Year!